I am William Shakespeare about to write Hamlet

It’s the year 1600 and I am already an accomplished playwright, having written plays and created characters like Romeo and Juliet that would be revered for centuries. This might have been enough for any other artist, but I am not any artist by any means.

I am William Shakespeare about to write Hamlet.  It’s the year 1600 and I am already an accomplished playwright.  I have wowed audiences, from the groundlings to the highest of the high including the great Queen Elizabeth herself, with an unprecedented combination of comedies and histories, many of which would be read for centuries, even retold in other mediums like film and television that I couldn’t possibly conceive.  The subjects I have covered will ring through the ages, transforming real people and events into myths better known to the world through my writings than actual history.  Four hundred years from now, when people hear about the crippled, evil king Richard III, they will think of my character, not the real man; when they hear about the legendary hero, warrior, and political Machiavel Henry V, they will know mostly the words I have put in his mouth.  When they speak of the vagaries of the human heart and the complexities of our relationships, they’ll undoubtedly be referencing The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labor’s Lost, As You Like It, and of course, Romeo and Juliet even if they aren’t aware of it.  If anything, these and others are more popular in your day as a result of modern communication than they could ever have been in my mine.  I might have wowed the crowds, putting on raucous, special effects laden, marathon performances for groundlings and royals alike, far from the more formal and staid affairs my work would become in the 19th century, and my plays might have been plagiarized across Europe even while I was alive, but there were many quarters of the world I couldn’t possibly reach, some of which were barely discovered yet.  Regardless, Romeo and Juliet alone would be enough to define a successfully literary career, having created two of the most recognizable characters in the entire world and having encapsulated the unique combination of comedy and tragedy that defines a passionate love which knows no boundaries, for almost any other artist.  Especially considering that playwrights and theater in my day weren’t exactly considered illustrious occupations, closer to a half step above a prostitute than how they would be revered in later generations.  You could say that I had already broken through artistic walls my colleagues never dared, but I am not any other artist.  In recent years, I have turned my attention to what was considered the highest form of art and literature at the time:  The tragedy, that most dramatic of stories, where a fatal flaw in a character who might otherwise be a hero leads to their undoing.  I have already had some success in this regard, creating Julius Caesar, where I upended convention and transformed the tragedy of a single man into the tragedy of an entire country, but nothing could foretell the story I was about to pen.

This is true even though the story was known long before I came to it, both as a legend and as a play some say I wrote myself about ten years earlier, known as the Ur-Hamlet.  The Scandinavian legend of Amleth dates back at least to the 13th century, when Saxo Grammaticus devoted parts of his Gesta Danorum to the tale of a prince who seeks revenge after his father was killed by his uncle, feigning being an imbecile to do so, though the actual origins maybe centuries older.  The story came to me through a French tome,  François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques published in 1572.  These various threads combined into the Ur-Hamlet, first performed a little more than a decade ago, but by the time you read this, the text of that version has been lost for centuries.  No one alive in your day knows what characters, passages, story points, and other ideas ultimately made it into the final Hamlet, whether it was a prequel of sorts, or something else entirely.  They don’t even know who wrote it, whether I did or Thomas Kyd.  The only thing said with any surety is that there was a ghost, which can be considered a significant enhancement to the original legend, one that I will maintain.  Perhaps because I was disappointed in the effort, relatively early in my career, I have never claimed authorship and it was never published either before or after my death, though this isn’t definitive either when there are at least three different versions of Hamlet published in 1603, 1604, and 1623, meaning I couldn’t resist playing around with the fate of the Danish prince either before or after, perhaps I did so for decades.  While some modern scholars have suggested I had to be the author because otherwise I’d be little more than a plagiarist, as Eric Sam put it, I would have  “plagiarized a known and named colleague [Thomas Kyd], least of all without a word of comment, let alone censure, from any of his critics,” others have remarked that I would be considered a plagiarist if I lived in your era anyway.  With only one exception, The Tempest, I have not told and will not tell an original story in my entire career.  Instead, I am the ultimate adapter, taking bits of myth and legend, fragments of history, parts of old, half forgotten stories lying around, and breathing entirely new life into them, life that future critics will regard as superior to anything that came before.  While you might consider this oddly ironic, how I can be so incredibly creative and yet so unoriginal at the same time, it’s critical to my unique genius.  Think of me as a scientist, or naturalist as they would say in my day, with my subject as the human mind and the totality of the human experience, exploring ancient stories primarily because they survived so long.  In that regard, I take things that everyone is roughly familiar with, simple, straightforward things, and I make them something more by imbuing the characters with histories, motivations, thoughts, feelings, and drives they didn’t have before, as though I was solving the original story as some kind of riddle, adding the detail that allows sparse source material to make emotional sense.  It would be centuries before anyone considered why stories are so important to humanity in a biological sense.  Why do we spend so much time, so many hours reading and watching what we know to be false?  Isn’t that simply wasted effort?  Twenty first century thinkers have suggested an evolutionary component, two of them actually.  First, stories bind us together, enable us to share a history and culture, but just as importantly they create a space in which we can safely experiment with potentially hazardous or even deadly situations, either literally or figuratively, exploring how we would react individually and as a group.

If this is true, I could be said to have discovered the principle long before evolution.  Because my characters are so fully realized, because my monologues give the audience the ability to hear their thoughts, and because I have included all of the contradictions that make people, people, my plays are a figurative stage for endless debate and perhaps nowhere is that more true than in Hamlet himself.  Simply put, for a revenge tragedy there isn’t much revenge.  There is instead a lot of procrastination, taken up by various musings on history, philosophy, religion, politics, and more.  This is taken to such a point of absurdity that scholars can’t even agree on the real subject of the most famous speech in the play and the entire English language.  When Hamlet declares “To be or not to be, that is the question,” no one really knows what he’s referring to.  Is he contemplating suicide?  Is he threatening his uncle with what happens after death?  Has he just gone mad?  Is he a coward?  Or is he so obsessed with useless thoughts, he simply can’t help having them?  No one knows for sure.  The only thing you do know, lurking in the background:  Hamlet has plenty of reasons to act.  His father has been murdered, his mother betrayed, and his throne stolen from him, and yet he dithers.  If nothing else, this is my chief innovation compared to the source material.  In the original Amleth, the titular character fakes being an imbecile for an extended period, but it is revealed that he spent this time planning his uncle’s comeuppance, not wasting it in idle, largely unrealized thoughts as the kingdom falls apart around him as Hamlet does.  While almost as many reasons have been posited for this failure to act as for the “To be or not to be” speech’s true subject, everything from Hamlet being too much of a Christian to commit cold-blooded murder even if it is justified to him simply being too weak, the reality is that he doesn’t act – ever, even at the climax he sort of resigns himself to his fate rather than relishing his role as revenger.  Harold Bloom, the renowned 20th century Shakespeare scholar who will claim I helped invent humanity itself on day, has even suggested that the entire final third of the play is staged as a desperate attempt to save the plot from the main character.  “The play’s subject … is neither mourning for the dead or revenge on the living…All that matters is Hamlet’s consciousness of his own consciousness, infinite, unlimited, and at war with itself,” he explained. In Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, “I propose that a civil war goes on between Hamlet and his maker,” he said. “Shakespeare…cannot control this most temperamentally capricious and preternaturally intelligent of all his creations.”  When Hamlet returns from his short-lived exile to England in Act V, Shakespeare prevents him as “drastically purged of self,” “Hamlet discovers that his life has been a quest with no object except his own endlessly burgeoning subjectivity. This truth, intolerable to any of us, helps turn Hamlet into an angel of destruction.”  Mr. Bloom continued, “Contending with unknown powers within his own self, the prince seems to struggle also with the spirit of evil in heavenly places…Hamlet…is not going to heaven, hell, purgatory, or limbo, or to any other theological fantasy. He has been there, done that, in his exhaustive drama…For Hamlet himself, death is not tragic but an apotheosis.”  Thus, “The enigma of Hamlet is that so many are moved to identify with him, and he does not want or need such identification. Yet he urges Horatio to stay alive to retell the play’s story lest the prince bear a wounded name forever. Why does Hamlet still care? Why do any of us care whether our name will be remembered and how?”

Given that I wrote the play, you might expect me to have an answer, to provide some insight, to solve the riddle, but I cannot.  As an author, I am something of an idiot savant, spinning thousands upon thousands of words at breakneck speed, words that could only come directly from my subconscious with little actual thought or planning.  To a large extent, I am a classic case of not knowing where the creative force comes from. Am I medium for something deeper, that is channeled through me, or do I come up with this entirely on my own? In the five to six years before Hamlet, I wrote no fewer than thirteen plays, at least nine of which are classics, still performed well into the 21st century.  I’ve already mentioned Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, and Julius Caesar, but this period also included Love’s Labor’s Lost,  Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing.  If I dropped dead right now, you would still know my name and scholars would still revere my works even if Hamlet was never let loose upon the world.  In the five to six years following the completion of Hamlet, I will write eight more plays, several of which are considered true masterworks in their genre including Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, all brilliant tragedies in their own right.  It’s as if Hamlet fully opened my subconscious mind to the possibilities and a torrent of every possible permutation was unleashed through my quill.  If Hamlet is a tragedy of inaction when action is justified, Othello is a tragedy of the inability to determine when action is justified, King Lear, a tragedy of the mind acting against itself, Macbeth, a tragedy of too much action, and Anthony and Cleopatra, the mind’s obsession with a false idol causing incoherent action.  The totality is the most extensive study of human flaws ever conceived or conducted.  No one in the history of literature has produced anything close, either in terms of quantity or quality, and indeed one can argue that all of literature afterwards has been fundamentally influenced by these efforts, even though pens were not even invented yet and I wrote with a quill on a piece of parchment.

For any other artist, this might have been enough, but my influence extends beyond literature and related mediums, down to the language itself.  Even if you’ve never heard my name, a near impossibility if you speak English at least, you recite my verses almost daily.  By some estimates I have added over 1,700 words to the English language, out of a truly vast vocabulary of over 20,000 used in my almost forty plays, over hundred fifty sonnets, and other poems.  If you’ve ever described someone as “fashionable” or declared something “obscene,” said you were “lonely” and went on a “rant,” or even thought something was just plain “zany” or “worthless,” you are quoting me.  Likewise, if you’ve never “slept one wink,” had “too much of a good thing,” believed something had “neither rhyme nor reason,” wished you were made of “sterner stuff” or that you could be “cruel to be kind,” even reached a “foregone conclusion,” went on a “wild-goose chase” only to find object of your desire has “melted into thin air,” you are quoting me. Mr. Bloom might not have been exaggerating when he said I invented humanity, but to the extent that you define yourself with words, you are defining yourself in terms I created, a framework I mastered, in a medium in which I reign supreme.  This only makes it even more incredible that no one truly knows who I am.  Scholars continue to debate who I actually was, whether the actor who lived at Stratford on Avon or a nobleman, the Earl of Oxford was behind the scenes, but does it really matter?  Even if you can definitely claim that I was one or the other – or even someone else entirely – my inspiration, motivations, creative process, and just about everything else that truly makes me who I am, remain complete mysteries even hundreds of years later.  Why did I write what I wrote at a time when playwrights were considered second class citizens?  What drove me to create so many characters, to tell so many stories, in so many genres, and yet only have one original credit to my name?  Was I satisfied with my life’s work, realizing that I had accomplished something truly extraordinary, or did I want more?  Beyond literature, what did I value most in life?  Was I satisfied personally as well, passing into the undiscovered country with few regrets?  What did I think about anything and everything?  Was an early revolutionist or a royalist, religious or irreligious?  What did I do with my time when I wasn’t writing?  No one can say, and I am not sure if I could say myself.  If there is one thing that history may take from my body of work, it’s that humans in general are moved by forces they cannot explain or control, even if it seems otherwise or they can reason out why they do what they do, there are perhaps no truer words spoken than by Hamlet himself, our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.  Even for someone like me, who wrote his thoughts down using some 20,000 words, all that remains are the words themselves.  Make of them what you will…